That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which explores how and why the once-conservative Fourth Circuit shifted dramatically leftwards. There are a lot of reasons for the failure, so don’t infer from the title that I think it’s all Bush’s fault.
My opening paragraphs:
When George W. Bush became president in January 2001, the Fourth Circuit was widely regarded as the most conservative federal appellate court in the country. Bush seemed well positioned to entrench and expand the Fourth Circuit’s conservative majority: There were four vacancies on the fifteen-seat court, and a fifth seat, held by Bill Clinton’s recess appointee Roger Gregory, would expire in late 2001. So Bush, by appointing conservative judges to those five seats, could expand the court’s conservative majority from a relatively narrow six-to-four edge (six to five, if you include Gregory’s temporary seat) to a whopping eleven-to-four margin.
Instead, when Bush left office eight years later, the Fourth Circuit still had only six conservative (or moderate conservative) judges, and its contingent of liberal judges in lifetime seats had actually increased from four to five. Plus, there were still four vacancies on the court that Bush handed off to Barack Obama, who was thus able to transform the Fourth Circuit into a liberal bastion.